


for you I'd beed myself dry

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (more like some bittersweet), 5am musings, F/M, dunno man, just because I wanted some happy, wedding fluff because how could I resist?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:13:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post - Everything. Some good days, some bad days, and the best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for you I'd beed myself dry

In the end, Will gets Alana. There is no flutter of satisfaction, no surge of adolescent indulgence, no boyish feeling of victory over getting the girl. _Need_ is more prominent, shrouding, and tiredness bone-deep, that takes the splendor away. It feels more like giving in, but the good kind; like slipping into an easy, deep sleep.

...

Will gets Alana, but Alana doesn’t get Will. She gets the scraps of him, charred and blackened and, regretfully, broken. But there are pieces; she learns how to make a puzzle. She tries to be forgiven, but guilt is ingrained in her bones. And after all, it was never anyone else’s forgiveness she needed - not Will’s not Jack’s, not anyone that got dragged down with them, but her own. It’s harder than she thought it would be.

It’s harder because she has ghosts instead of nightmares; she sees them, standing at the window, at the sea, at the foot of the bed. Their sereness, instead of offering comfort, evoke the opposite. It’s a silent, incessant taunting. The most frequent of those visitors include the one with the gash at her neck, a cavity where an ear should be. But there is one ghost more precious and persistent than the others. The one whom she kisses goodnight, whose hair she strokes after a nightmare, whose collarbone she whispers _good morning_ into when they wake.

...

Memories come back in flashes. They grip her at any given moment in the day, and there is never any telling whether they will bring solace or havoc. She remembers: the before, the before anything and everything, before they were mere specks among hoards of war and loss. Little, uncountable things before she was the catalyst for the catastrophe that swallowed them whole, vivid like the first stroke of paint on a plain canvas. Her hands, tediously straddling and blurring the lines between friendship and _more_ , when they were resting on his cheek, at the nape of his neck, her fingers curled in his. She remembers pressing a steaming styrofoam cup in his hand with a look that seemed to say, _I know how you like your coffee - two sugars, no milk - and it’s not just because we work together. I also know you didn’t sleep last night._ His smile, less than genuine but still trying, and she appreciated it nonetheless.

She remembers, though she tries not to, though she knows it’s worse to live in denial: his face, gaunt and gray, obscured by bars, but a fire lucid in his eyes that she realized, only later, was there because he knew the dreadful truth.

And more, so much more; a hole in the chimney, a prison cell, a hospital, a courtroom, a parting, a reunion. Sometimes repeated, not always in that order. She tries to weigh it, to balance it; the before, the in-between, the after. The good, the bad, the bittersweet. The only thing consistent is that she loved him every time, loved him when she had nothing else to give, loved him because she had nothing she could give.

...

Will’s wounds are more tangible than Alana’s, and they leave scars. At his shoulder (stabbed, when he was a cop), his hip (Lecter’s linoleum knife), his cheek (Dohlerhyde’s dagger), countless others, beneath the skin, that match with hers. He also gets Alana’s hands to comfort him through the two; through the countless. Sometimes it wrecks him, how often he has to look at it, proof of his brokenness, how she never flinches. He doesn’t like to think about how often she has to see them. But he also knows she doesn’t care.

Nightmares were always inevitable, but accepting and ceasing to fight them make it no less bearable. There are vivid, beautiful hallucinations that fold and unfold in his mind like intricate origami every night. They never really go away. But Alana is there, folded at his side, a sacred promise, a blessed reassurance.

...

When Will proposes, it’s more a formality than anything, proof that they can have that now, a reminder that they can have things that seemed impossible, untouchable, before.

Because some days Will can’t find pleasure in anything, not the beach or the dogs or Alana or anything he’s built for fear it will be taken away. There are times when Alana suddenly can’t look him in the face for fear of bursting into tears in wake of some lucid, jarring memory and he doesn’t know how to comfort her. There are times when she _does_ burst into tears, and he tries his best. There times when Will abruptly stops whatever he’s doing and stares into space like he’s had a horrible revelation, and he has to grit his teeth until the flashbacks pass. There are times when Alana can’t get out of bed for an ungodly amount of hours, there are times when Will doesn’t come to bed with her at all. And most times she can comfort him, sputtering and shaking through a nightmare, but there are times when it’s not enough, when the visions are too lucid, when he fear is too all-consuming, when panic douses him like ice water. All she can do is hold him until its over, even though it shatters her heart all over again.

There are times when this home, the unprecedented amount of physical distance between himself and tragedy, the salt silvered wood and the tide pools and sand underneath his feet, doesn’t seem like enough. But he remembers: this beach, Wolf Trap - those are all just places he once lived. But with Alana - that’s the place he’ll always want to be. He’s learned the difference.

...

They get married on a day in June on their beach, the breeze crisp and warm, the sun peeking through wispy streaks of clouds. They say _I do_ in front of a relatively meager amount of guests, he kisses her; chastely, unhurriedly, content, familiar. Somewhere in the crowd, Beverly, Price, and Zeller all collectively wolf-whistle, and her lips fall away from his in a laugh, but that’s okay; he’d take laughing with her, truly and heartily, over kissing her any day. The rest of them cheer. This isn’t something he’d ever allowed himself to think about in the old days, something that never even seemed like enough of a probability to even take into a scrap of consideration; he doesn’t know about Alana, but he thinks if he’d asked her, then, she would’ve said the same. But he still thinks, absurdly, that he’s been waiting for this moment his whole life, long before he even knew it was a possibility.

A few people speak at the reception, but Will appreciates Beverly’s speech the most, when she exacerbates how _awful_ it is being a third wheel, and by the end they’re all laughing so hard it hurts to breathe.

Eventually Alana kicks off her heels and they dance; Will isn’t fond of it, she knows, had grumbled and groaned about it for ages, but she likes teasing him, and he’d eventually had no choice but loosen up enough to enjoy it, but he’d warned her, with fierce and teasing conviction, he only enjoyed it for her.

“I don’t feel like me,” he tells her dreamily, palms settling on the curve of her hips, hers wound around the nape of his neck and shoulder. He breathes in the sight of her; literally breathtaking, dark hair sprawling over a white dress, graceful and easy and beautiful, like one of those mystifying women only heard of in poems. Will feels so full, full of life and love and all the happiness the world has to offer.

“What do you feel like?”

“Like…” Will struggles for a moment to articulate it, to grasp it. “Different. A different person. Like the old me has sauntered off to take a walk, left a new one in its place.”

Alana fixes him a half bemused smile and says, “And which one did I just marry?”

“The new one. But that’s okay, because he feels...normal, and...happy, I guess, is the word I’m looking for.”

Her eyes widen and fill up with such warmth and shine, threatening tears, and he’s afraid she might cry. He hasn’t even noticed they’ve stopped swaying to the music, that other guests have started to file in to dance, tucked closely together.

Alana ducks her head and leans it against his shoulder, presumably to stifle the tears, and she says, throat full, “That’s all I ever wanted for you. Happy and healthy and safe.”

Will exhales a contented sigh, runs his hands up her sides, her rib cage brushing ever so slightly against his knuckles, and is momentarily fascinated with the way her bones all hold themselves together underneath her skin no matter how fragile they look under her skin. He tells himself, over and over again, that she is beautiful. She may as well be one of those gentle girls that little boys are told they’re supposed to dream of, tender and soft, long hair sweeping, skin sweet-smelling, waiting to be whisked away from their high tower. Alana can be all those things, he knew, but on the whole, she is something else entirely. More a warrior than some fantasy maiden. She had gone into battle beside him, and that was a different thing. It’s the power, the thrill, the intimacy of putting your faith, your trust, your life in someone else’s hands. Something that leaves you crackling and wonderfully bewildered, electricity tinging your skin.

“I love you,” he murmurs into the curve of her neck. He’d closed his eyes; had almost forgotten where they were. She doesn’t answer for a long moment. Then, slowly, taste-testing the words: “I love you." She sighs, and tries to express something else, something more. "And I care about you. More than...anything, more than...I ever fathomed I could care about another person. That’s the truth.”

Somehow he doubts that. Alana cares entirely and immensely, and he thinks her heart is big enough to contain all the caring the world could offer her. He doesn’t say anything, though. Just continues to sway her to the music and the ebb of the sea, the breeze warm across his face, the moon and stars winking down at them. Will’s head is spinning, not unpleasantly so, from the wine and the dancing and the woman in his arms. For a moment he felt as if the world had tilted on its axis (and it might as well had, if he feels this content), and they were hurtling softly through space, wrapped in a silk blanket of stars and sea.

He knows they will never really be okay. That there are scars and lesions and wounds cut too deep to heal, that there will be good days, and bad days, and horrible days, and hopeful ones, and they will trudge through them like they have through everything else. That they have never, can never, will never, break.

In that moment, he knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.


End file.
